Leave them; they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.

Matthew 15:14

My favorite atheist internet commenter Pat Condell explains what caused Brexit and Trump: the manifest incompetence of leadership throughout the West. Political revolutions rarely occur because they are planned through conspiracies, but rather as a result of the blindingly obvious inability of the Old Regime to successfully grapple with the problems that confront it. The incompetence of the Old Regime shatters confidence in it, and allows new sources of leadership to come to the fore, sometimes for the good and sometimes for the bad. The news media in the West tend to be ardent defenders of the current Old Regime and therefore are missing the biggest story since the fall of European Communism in 1989, which, come to think of it, took most of the news media then by complete surprise, most members of the press assuming that the Communist states were a permanent feature and not a momentary blip of History. That same May Fly view still remains at work in our time and helps explain why Brexit and the victory of Trump came as such shocking surprises to the people who dedicate themselves to knowing what is going on in their societies. Blind guides indeed.

The Scottish First Minister is calling for another vote on Independence, because Brexit. Why it seems only three years ago, because it was, that the cause of Independence was rejected by the Scottish voters. The Scots dodged a bullet that time. This time I hope the English dodge a bullet, and the Scots march off playing Scotland the Brave. As in 2014, here are my reasons for supporting Scottish independence:

Well, the Scottish independence referendum is up for a vote on September 18. I suspect that if the referendum supports independence that such a move will be an economic disaster for Scotland, combined with a socialist government whose economic forecasts seem to owe just as much to Groucho, Harpo and Chico as they do Karl. Having said that I am all in favor of Scottish independence. Why?

Depriving Labour of 63 Scottish MPs would probably ensure Tory government in England for the foreseeable future and that would be good for the US both in foreign policy and trade.

Socialists are completely dominant in Scotland and probably will be until they have total power to cause the type of disasters that socialists routinely bring about when they govern unchecked.

Scotland has bred since World War II generations who believe that a socialist utopia can exist in Scotland if it were not for malevolent forces south of the border preventing the building of paradise. They view Mel Gibson’s Braveheart flick as a documentary. Time to put this myth to a test. Vote Yes for Scottish independence if you have the misfortune to currently reside in the land of some of my ancestors.

Tom Whyman, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Essex, explains the British departure from the European Union in The New York Times. It was all those Neanderthals with whom he’s forced to live:

Alresford is my personal hell.

We are not used to thinking that a place like this — a pleasant town with a pretty center — might actually be hell. There is almost no poverty and only the occasional act of violence. There are good schools, a range of shops, a heritage railway. In fact, it’s somewhere that a lot of people, apparently, actively want to live: Houses in the center easily sell for upward of a million pounds. (What they will cost once the vote to leave the European Union makes the economy crater remains to be seen.)

But dig below the surface, and you will find the demons crawling. You can see them in the looks that residents give you when they pass; sneering snobs glaring down their noses with entitlement; small-minded townies, bullying you with eyes that you recognize from the primary school lunchroom; the old people, 80 and above, wearing blank stares. You can hear it in their bothered tutting at the bus stop (especially if they ever hear a visitor mispronouncing the name of the town), the shots that constantly ring out from across the countryside as they set about murdering as many of the local pheasants as they can.

Since my late teens, every effort I have ever exerted has been with the intention of escaping Alresford. And yet, I am an early-career academic and so I am forced to move back, every summer, to live with my parents because I cannot afford to pay rent elsewhere after my temporary teaching contract ends. Then, sometimes, I think: What if I’m actually secretly comfortable here? What if I have chosen the security of death in Alresford over the risks of life elsewhere? What if I am in fact fully in the clutches of Alresfordism?

Even if I’d managed to cast my vote, it would have been pointless. The Remain campaign didn’t just lose by my vote, we lost by more than a million. Britons wanted to make our world smaller. They wanted to make it more like Alresford. As far as I can tell, they are going to get exactly what they wanted.

All I can do is look out at the nature from the window of my room in Alresford. I’m from here, so I can’t be sure whether or not this is just another type of nihilism, but I think: Well, if all this nature is bigger than us, then I want it be get even bigger. I want it to become so big that it will consume all of our smallnesses, invalidate them, smother them out. Not just Alresford. I want a demented, throbbing, fecund nature to overrun this whole country, to overturn the wretched consequences of the laws that we have, in our stupidity, set for ourselves.

And there it is. People who love their country, despite its faults and sins, and respect and revere its national traditions are xenophobic, exclusionary racists.

A movie made by the now victorious Brexit proponents in Britain. It is interesting how largely uniform the elite reaction around the world has been to Brexit: dismayed disbelief that such a thing could have come to pass. A transnational elite has been developing for the last fifty years that have little loyalty to their purported nations. Their loyalty is to one another and to producing a world where people like them pull the strings and the rest of us dance to their tunes. To say that such an arrangement is anti-democratic is to understate the case. They envision a world where concepts like democracy and national sovereignty have no meaning. Anything that advances their agenda of ever increasing centralization and control is good. Thus the hysteria over global warming is good because it fosters transnational authorities and the removal of power from elected officials in nations to faceless international bureaucrats, subject to no laws except the edicts regulations they wish to impose.

The ever prescient CS Lewis saw this coming when he explained his vision of Hell:

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”

As we approach July 4, I dedicate myself to fighting against this ominous trend in the world, that is antithetical to everything that the Founding Fathers stood for and fought for. Brexit was a victory in a war that most of us did not realize was going on. We do now.

‘We have our own dream and our own task. We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked, but not comprised. We are interested and associated, but not absorbed.’

Winston Churchill, May 9, 1938

Well, this will send shock waves around the globe. The voters of Great Britain have voted narrowly to leave the European Union:

Britain has voted to leave the European Union, with the Leave campaign securing around 51.8 per cent of the vote.

David Cameron, who will address the nation shortly, is now facing calls to resign as Prime Minister.

While England voted overwhelmingly for Brexit, Scotland and Northern Ireland backed Remain. Statements are expected to be made by Sinn Fein and the SNP later today calling for a breakaway from the Union. London backed Remain but the turnout was lower than expected because of bad weather.

The pound crashed to the lowest level since 1985 as sterling fell below $1.35. Complacency about a Brexit outcome will come clear this morning, as out of hours trading suggests that the FTSE 100 will drop by 8.8pc, or by some 560 points. The fall would be the third worst in history if stocks ended the day down as sharply.